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Sarah Murphy? Minnie Jackson?”

      “Oh, my God!” cried the girl cupping her tear-stained face in her hands. “I don’t want my mother to know. I don’t want my mother to know.”

      “Come on now!”

      “Shut up!” cried Amory at Olson.

      An instant’s pause.

      “Stella Robbins,” she faltered finally. “General Delivery, Rugway, New Hampshire.”

      Olson snapped his notebook shut and looked at them very ponderously.

      “By rights the hotel could turn the evidence over to the police and you’d go to penitentiary, you would, for bringin’ a girl from one State to ‘nother f’r immoral purp’ses—” He paused to let the majesty of his words sink in. “But — the hotel is going to let you off.”

      “It doesn’t want to get in the papers,” cried Jill fiercely. “Let us off! Huh!”

      A great lightness surrounded Amory. He realized that he was safe and only then did he appreciate the full enormity of what he might have incurred.

      “However,” continued Olson, “there’s a protective association among the hotels. There’s been too much of this stuff, and we got a ‘rangement with the newspapers so that you get a little free publicity. Not the name of the hotel, but just a line sayin’ that you had a little trouble in ‘lantic City. See?”

      “I see.”

      “You’re gettin’ off light — damn light — but—”

      “Come on,” said Amory briskly. “Let’s get out of here. We don’t need a valedictory.”

      Olson walked through the bathroom and took a cursory glance at Alec’s still form. Then he extinguished the lights and motioned them to follow him. As they walked into the elevator Amory considered a piece of bravado — yielded finally. He reached out and tapped Olson on the arm.

      “Would you mind taking off your hat? There’s a lady in the elevator.”

      Olson’s hat came off slowly. There was a rather embarrassing two minutes under the lights of the lobby while the night clerk and a few belated guests stared at them curiously; the loudly dressed girl with bent head, the handsome young man with his chin several points aloft; the inference was quite obvious. Then the chill outdoors — where the salt air was fresher and keener still with the first hints of morning.

      “You can get one of those taxis and beat it,” said Olson, pointing to the blurred outline of two machines whose drivers were presumably asleep inside.

      “Good-by,” said Olson. He reached in his pocket suggestively, but Amory snorted, and, taking the girl’s arm, turned away.

      “Where did you tell the driver to go?” she asked as they whirled along the dim street.

      “The station.”

      “If that guy writes my mother—”

      “He won’t. Nobody’ll ever know about this — except our friends and enemies.”

      Dawn was breaking over the sea.

      “It’s getting blue,” she said.

      “It does very well,” agreed Amory critically, and then as an afterthought: “It’s almost breakfast-time — do you want something to eat?”

      “Food—” she said with a cheerful laugh. “Food is what queered the party. We ordered a big supper to be sent up to the room about two o’clock. Alec didn’t give the waiter a tip, so I guess the little bastard snitched.”

      Jill’s low spirits seemed to have gone faster than the scattering night. “Let me tell you,” she said emphatically, “when you want to stage that sorta party stay away from liquor, and when you want to get tight stay away from bedrooms.”

      “I’ll remember.”

      He tapped suddenly at the glass and they drew up at the door of an all-night restaurant.

      “Is Alec a great friend of yours?” asked Jill as they perched themselves on high stools inside, and set their elbows on the dingy counter.

      “He used to be. He probably won’t want to be any more — and never understand why.”

      “It was sorta crazy you takin’ all that blame. Is he pretty important? Kinda more important than you are?”

      Amory laughed.

      “That remains to be seen,” he answered. “That’s the question.”

       THE COLLAPSE OF SEVERAL PILLARS

      Two days later back in New York Amory found in a newspaper what he had been searching for — a dozen lines which announced to whom it might concern that Mr. Amory Blaine, who “gave his address” as, etc., had been requested to leave his hotel in Atlantic City because of entertaining in his room a lady not his wife.

      Then he started, and his fingers trembled, for directly above was a longer paragraph of which the first words were:

      “Mr. and Mrs. Leland R. Connage are announcing the engagement of their daughter, Rosalind, to Mr. J. Dawson Ryder, of Hartford, Connecticut—”

      He dropped the paper and lay down on his bed with a frightened, sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach. She was gone, definitely, finally gone. Until now he had half unconsciously cherished the hope deep in his heart that some day she would need him and send for him, cry that it had been a mistake, that her heart ached only for the pain she had caused him. Never again could he find even the sombre luxury of wanting her — not this Rosalind, harder, older — nor any beaten, broken woman that his imagination brought to the door of his forties — Amory had wanted her youth, the fresh radiance of her mind and body, the stuff that she was selling now once and for all. So far as he was concerned, young Rosalind was dead.

      A day later came a crisp, terse letter from Mr. Barton in Chicago, which informed him that as three more street-car companies had gone into the hands of receivers he could expect for the present no further remittances. Last of all, on a dazed Sunday night, a telegram told him of Monsignor Darcy’s sudden death in Philadelphia five days before.

      He knew then what it was that he had perceived among the curtains of the room in Atlantic City.

Chapter 5

       The Egotist Becomes a Personage

       Table of Contents

      “A fathom deep in sleep I lie

       With old desires, restrained before,

       To clamor lifeward with a cry,

       As dark flies out the greying door;

       And so in quest of creeds to share

       I seek assertive day again…

       But old monotony is there:

       Endless avenues of rain.

       Oh, might I rise again! Might I

       Throw off the heat of that old wine,

       See the new morning mass the sky

       With fairy towers, line on line;

       Find each mirage in the high air

       A symbol, not a dream again…

       But old monotony is there:

       Endless avenues of rain.”

      Under the glass portcullis of a theatre Amory stood, watching the first great drops of rain splatter down and flatten to dark stains on the sidewalk. The air became gray and opalescent; a solitary light suddenly outlined a window over the way; then another light;

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